jQuery Getting Started

What is jQuery?

jQuery is a light weight JavaScript framework, used to simplify JavaScript coding for web developers, jQuery is getting popular, it is CSS3 compliant and is supported by all major browsers.

jQuery can be used to perform all the functionality which we do using JavaScript, the advantage is that the same output can be achieved using lesser code. Since jQuery is based on JavaScript, it is independent of the underlying technology used to develop the web pages. jQuery can be used with Asp, Asp.Net, JSP, PHP and all other web development technologies.

Installing jQuery
Installing and using jQuery is very simple, jQuery comes as a JavaScript (.js) file, just download the latest version of jQuery file and add a reference to it in your web page.

<script type="text/javascript" src="JavaScript/jquery-1.7.2.js"></script>

That’s it, you are now ready to use jQuery in your web page.

To see, how to install and use jQuery in an Asp.Net page refer the post Asp.Net jQuery Hello World Sample.

The latest version on jQuery framework, at the time of writing this post is v1.7.2, the framework files can be downloaded from the jQuery site’s download section.
http://docs.jquery.com/Downloading_jQuery

Versions
The jQuery Framework files come in 2 flavors Uncompressed and Minified

Uncompressed file - jquery-1.7.2.js
Minified file - jquery-1.7.2.min.js

The Uncompressed version of the file contains comments and well formatted, advisable to use in the development environment, where debugging support is essential. The size of this file is large due to the comments and formatting (250K approx)

The Minified version of the file is a compressed version, where the comments and white spaces are stripped off. It is intended to be used in the production environment, so that the file can be downloaded quickly. The size of this file is less compared to the uncompressed version (100K approx)

To see, how to install and use jQuery in an Asp.Net page refer the post Asp.Net jQuery Hello World Sample.

jQuery Plugins
In addition to the basic JavaScript functionalities like alter, validations etc, jQuery also provides support for animations, Ajax calls. There are a number of jQuery plug-in available in the web, which can be downloaded and attached to the basic jQuery library to provide additional features.

Some of the popular Plugins are listed in the jQuery site’s Popular Plugins section.http://archive.plugins.jquery.com/most-popular